Privacy Policy
Effective date: 5 June 2026
Last updated: 5 June 2026
Who we are
This Privacy Policy describes how Nowtech Limited (NZBN 9429033497617, registered at 66 Centennial Drive, Whitianga 3510, New Zealand) collects, uses, stores, and shares personal information when you use the Haile product family: the Haile Companion app, the Haile Assist app, the Haile shop on haile.nz, and the Haile Monitor service.
You can contact us about this policy at any time:
- Email: hello@haile.nz
- Post: Nowtech Limited, 66 Centennial Drive, Whitianga 3510, New Zealand
We are subject to the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and the thirteen Information Privacy Principles that Act sets out. If you believe we have not handled your information correctly, you can complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner: privacy.org.nz.
Plain-language summary (for the people in a hurry)
- We collect what we need to make Haile work: account details, family relationships you tell us about, sensor events from your home (if you have Monitor), photos and messages you upload, and basic payment metadata.
- We do not sell your data to anyone, ever.
- We do not show advertising in any Haile product.
- Sensor events and photos stay in New Zealand and Sydney (our cloud region). They are not shared with overseas advertising networks.
- Video calls between family members go directly between devices and are not recorded.
- You can ask for a copy of your information, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, at any time.
- If Haile ever shuts down, we will give you 90 days notice and open-source our apps so you can keep using your hardware.
The detail below explains all of the above more fully.
What information we collect
We collect different information depending on which parts of Haile you use.
When you create a Haile Assist account
- Your name, email address, and mobile phone number.
- A password (stored as a hashed value; we never see your actual password).
- The names, email addresses, and mobile phone numbers of any family members you invite as household admins.
When you set up Haile Companion on a tablet
- The Companion device is paired to your household with a one-time PIN from Haile Assist.
- The tablet identifier and Companion app version, so we can support the install.
When you have Haile Monitor sensors installed
- Sensor events: each event records the sensor identifier, event type (motion detected, door opened, button pressed, low battery, and similar), and the time the event occurred.
- Battery levels reported by sensors.
- Sensor health and gateway connectivity status.
- We do not record audio or continuous video from sensors. The cameras included in the Monitor Standard and Premium tiers operate in privacy mode by default, with motorised privacy positions and a privacy overlay enabled, and only stream live audio and video during an active emergency intercom call initiated by an authorised family member.
When you use the family photo feed or async messages
- Photos and short voice or video clips that family members upload through Haile Assist for the household.
- Captions, reactions, and “seen” status.
When you make a video call
- Call metadata: who called whom, when, and how long the call lasted.
- We do not record the audio or video of the call itself. Calls route peer-to-peer or through a media relay (LiveKit) but are not stored.
When you buy hardware or subscribe to Assist Care or Haile Monitor
- Billing name and address.
- Payment method metadata: card last four digits, card brand, expiry date. Full card numbers are stored only by our payment processor (Stripe) and never reach our servers.
- Hardware order details, shipping address, NZ Post tracking numbers.
When you contact us for support
- The contents of your support request (email, in-app message).
- Any device diagnostic information we ask you to share, with your permission.
Why we collect this information
| Purpose | Information used |
|---|---|
| Provide the Haile Companion, Assist, Monitor, and Assist Care services | Account details, household roster, sensor events, photos and messages, device list |
| Send alerts to family members about sensor events and SOS button presses | Account contact details, sensor event log, family roster |
| Process payments for Assist hardware retail, Assist Care subscription, and Haile Monitor | Billing details, payment metadata |
| Fulfil battery mailout, hardware replacement under the lifetime device guarantee, and other Care services | Device list, shipping address |
| Diagnose and resolve service issues | Sensor health, device diagnostics, support correspondence |
| Comply with our legal obligations under New Zealand law | All of the above as required |
| Detect and prevent fraudulent or unauthorised activity | Account access logs |
We do not use your information for:
- Advertising or marketing analytics outside of direct communication with you (we may email you about Haile service updates, but only to the email address on your account).
- Profiling for behavioural analysis.
- Sale to third parties.
- Training of AI or machine-learning models outside our daily AI summary generation (which is described separately below and uses only your own household’s data).
How the daily AI summary uses your data
Haile Monitor produces a daily plain-English summary of the sensor activity in the home. This summary is generated by sending the day’s sensor event log to a large-language-model service (Anthropic Claude Haiku, or another provider we may choose in future and notify you about). The data sent is limited to:
- Sensor identifiers and friendly names you assigned (for example, “front door” or “kitchen”).
- Sensor event timestamps and types.
- A daily summary template prompt.
We do not send personal identifiers, names of household members, photos, video, or audio to the language-model provider. The provider does not retain the data after generating the summary, and we do not use the summary or the sensor data to train any general-purpose model.
Where your information is stored
- The Haile API and database run on cloud servers in Sydney, Australia and New Zealand. Sydney is used primarily for latency-sensitive media relay; the primary tenant database is hosted in a New Zealand-resident cloud region.
- Photos, async messages, and other media uploaded to the family feed are stored in Cloudflare R2 or an equivalent object-storage service with edge presence in Australia and New Zealand. We choose providers that offer data residency in Australia or New Zealand only.
- Payment data is handled by Stripe, which complies with PCI-DSS and operates in Australia and New Zealand for our purposes.
- SMS messages are routed via ClickSend (Australian-headquartered, NZ-licensed sender).
- Push notifications are routed via Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google) to your iOS or Android device. The notification payload is minimised so that no sensitive content reaches Google’s servers.
How long we keep your information
| Information | Retention period |
|---|---|
| Account details | While your account is active, plus 30 days after cancellation, then deleted |
| Household roster and family relationships | Same as account |
| Sensor events from Haile Monitor | Rolling 12 months, then deleted; daily summaries retained 24 months |
| Photos on the family feed (free tier) | 90 days from upload, then deleted |
| Photos on the family feed (Assist Care subscribers) | Indefinitely, while Care subscription is active |
| Async voice and video messages (free tier) | 30 days from upload, then deleted |
| Async messages (Assist Care subscribers) | Indefinitely, while Care subscription is active |
| Video call metadata | 24 months |
| Payment metadata | As long as legally required for tax and accounting (currently 7 years under New Zealand tax law) |
| Support correspondence | 3 years after last interaction |
| Diagnostic logs | 90 days |
When information is “deleted” we mean removed from production systems. Backups are retained for up to 90 days for disaster recovery and are then overwritten.
Who we share information with
We share information only with the third parties below, and only as needed to provide the Haile service. We have data-processing agreements in place with each of them where applicable.
| Third party | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe (payments) | Billing details, payment metadata | Process payments for hardware, Care subscription, Monitor |
| ClickSend (SMS) | Mobile phone number, SMS body | Route SMS alerts and acknowledgement links |
| LiveKit (video/voice calling infrastructure) | Call routing metadata; media transit, not stored | Connect calls between family members |
| Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications) | Device tokens, minimal notification payloads | Deliver push notifications |
| Cloudflare (CDN, DNS, object storage) | Encrypted media in transit; haile.nz site traffic | Deliver photos and messages, serve the public site |
| Anthropic (AI daily summary) | Sensor event log for the day, in anonymised form | Generate the plain-English daily summary |
| NZ Post (battery and device shipments) | Shipping address, package contents description | Deliver batteries under Assist Care and replacement devices under the lifetime guarantee |
| Our accounting and tax advisors | Aggregated financial data | Tax and accounting compliance |
| New Zealand government authorities | Only what is legally required | Comply with court orders, lawful information requests |
We do not share information with advertising networks, data brokers, or analytics providers that combine your data with information from other sources.
Your rights under the Privacy Act 2020
You have the right to:
- Ask what information we hold about you. Email hello@haile.nz with the subject “Access request”. We will respond within 20 working days as required by the Act.
- Ask us to correct information that is wrong or out of date. Same process.
- Ask us to delete your information. We will delete it unless we are required by law to retain it (for example, certain payment records for tax purposes). Where we are required to retain, we will tell you what and for how long.
- Withdraw consent for any optional data use at any time. You can also cancel your subscription or account, which triggers the deletion process above.
- Complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner if you believe we have breached the Act. Contact details at privacy.org.nz.
To exercise these rights, email hello@haile.nz with a description of what you want. We may ask you to verify your identity before acting on requests that involve sensitive data.
Children
Haile is designed for use by households where an adult child manages the service on behalf of an elderly family member. The Haile Companion app installed on a tablet may be used by a person of any adult age, including those over 65. Haile is not designed for use by people under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a person under 18 has provided us with personal information, please contact hello@haile.nz so we can delete it.
Security
We take reasonable steps to protect your information from loss, unauthorised access, and misuse. These include:
- Encryption in transit (HTTPS for app and web traffic, TLS for mail).
- Encryption at rest for the primary database and object storage.
- WireGuard VPN between the gateway in your home (if you have Haile Monitor) and our cloud servers.
- Access controls on our cloud infrastructure.
- Regular security review of dependencies and configurations.
No system is perfectly secure. If we ever experience a personal-information breach that we are required to report under the Privacy Act 2020, we will notify affected users and the Privacy Commissioner promptly.
Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will:
- Update the “Last updated” date at the top of the policy.
- Email all account holders at least 30 days before material changes take effect, where the change reduces your rights or expands our use of your data.
Minor changes (typo corrections, clarifications that do not materially change how we handle your information) may be made without notice. Historical versions are kept in our public git repository.
If Haile ever shuts down
We have committed to a strong end-of-life process for our customers. If Nowtech Limited ceases to operate the Haile service:
- We will give at least 90 days notice before any shutdown, except in the case of regulatory shutdown or insolvency where shorter notice may be unavoidable.
- We will provide a tool to export your data in standard formats (device list, family roster, message archive, photo feed).
- We will open-source the Haile Companion app, the Haile Assist app, and the Haile API source code under a permissive open-source licence (MIT or Apache 2.0), so that you can run your own Haile stack on equivalent open-source software (such as Home Assistant) or transfer your hardware to another operator.
- Active warranty claims under the Assist Care lifetime device guarantee will be honoured for the remaining cover period.
- You keep the hardware you have purchased outright.
This commitment is part of why we ask you to trust us with your family’s information. We take it seriously.
Contact
Questions about this policy: hello@haile.nz
Postal: Nowtech Limited, 66 Centennial Drive, Whitianga 3510, New Zealand.